St. Tammany Parish is currently dealing with a booming population, but that’s leading to some unwanted issues in response. The area doesn’t have an underground sewerage system and has to rely on septic tanks to treat waste in individual homes. Water from those tanks ultimately ends up in ditches and then into Lake Pontchartrain. Much of that water ends up untreated or undertreated, and that could lead to a slew of health issues.
St. Tammany Parish Councilman Jeff Corbin spoke to WWL’s Tommy Tucker about the challenges the area has faced as population expansion uncovers larger issues.
“There was a pilot program put into place to inspect 1,000 systems in St. Tammany Parish. 21% of the systems in this random test of our pilot program failed. So, they were putting raw or undertreated sewage into our ditches,” Corbin explained.
He went on to say that there was a wide variance in the failing systems discovered. “Some of them failed and were not functioning at all. Some failed and were only partially functioning,” Corbin added.
While the situation may seem dire, solutions have been presented.
“There is a grant program being used to put subsurface (sewerage) infrastructure in one area. We’d like to gradually, in the long term, transition most systems to this subsurface regional system,” Corbin told Tommy Tucker.
“This would give us an opportunity to start addressing the issues we have. In the long term, this would allow us to put all (or most) of our systems onto sub-surface utility-like sewage treatment,” Corbin went on to say.
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